Has the name of the country called ‘Turkey’ changed?
If so, why?
And what is the correct way to refer to it these days?
‘Turkey’ the Oxford tells us means, ‘the name of a country in south-eastern Europe and Anatolia, formerly used as the name of the lands of the Turkic-speaking peoples…’
And the country has been known by that name in English since the 1400s.
But at the request of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the United Nations in June 2022 agreed to use the spelling ‘Türkiye’ to refer to the country.
In January 2023 the US State Department followed suit.
This new spelling brings with it a new pronunciation.
In English ‘Türkiye’ is pronounced as turk-EE-ah.
And I have heard both Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese use this new pronunciation.
Is this just being polite, and using the form the locals prefer?
Or is it something else?
Why did Erdogan make the request?
Because ‘Türkiye’ is how the country is spelled in its native Modern Turkish alphabet, and Erdogan’s rebranding of its spelling is part of his larger nationalistic, anti-Western agenda.
We have to remember that Erdogan is running an increasingly repressive Islamist dictatorship that has been busying itself for over a decade with decoupling from the West and aligning with Russia and Iran.
And we are under no obligation to spell or pronounce place names in the same way as the locals.
The locals spell (and pronounce) ‘Munich’ as ‘Munchen’.
We don’t do the same.
The locals spell (and pronounce) the Italian city ‘Florence’ as ‘Firenze.’
We don’t.
There is no intelligent reason to change our spelling or pronunciation of ‘Turkey.’
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